over the side.

All dinner-time, and all after dinner-time, we talked it over again. I
gave him my views of his plan, and he very much approved of the same. I
told him I had nearly decided, but not quite. "Well, well," says he,
"come down to Liverpool to-morrow with me, and see the Golden Mary." I
liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if golden stands
for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when I said I would
go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were on board the Golden
Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to come down and see her,
what she was. I declare her to have been the completest and most
exquisite Beauty that ever I set my eyes upon.

We had inspected every timber in her, and had come back to the gangway to
go ashore from the dock-basin, when I put out my hand to my friend.
"Touch upon it," says I, "and touch heartily. I take command of this
ship, and I am hers and yours, if I can get John Steadiman for my chief
mate."

John Steadiman had sailed with me four voyages. The first voyage John
was third mate out to China, and came home second. The other three
voyages he was my first officer. At this time of chartering the Golden
Mary, he was aged thirty-two. A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very
neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and
never in it, a face that pleased everybody and that all children took to,
a habit of going about singing as cheerily as a blackbird, and a perfect
sailor.

We were in one of those Liverpool hackney-coaches in less than a minute,
and we cruised about in her upwards of three hours, looking for John.